The Register

On-site generation plant aims to 'alleviate pressure on energy demand from the grid' Vantage Data Centers is joining the crowded Irish datacenter market with its first site in the Emerald Isle due to come online in 2024. In view of ongoing power constraints in the country, the project is to include on-site power generation....

Infosec eggheads find iGiant left EU iOS 17 users open to being tracked around the web Apple's grudging accommodation of European antitrust rules by allowing third-party app stores on iPhones has left users of its Safari browser exposed to potential web activity tracking....

And hatches 2030 plan to beat US for Mars rock retrieval China's space program will next week launch mission that aims to land on the Moon, take samples, and bring them back to Earth....

'This is the Oppenheimer moment of our generation' Video Austria's foreign minister on Monday likened the rise of military artificial intelligence to the existential crisis faced by the creators of the first atomic bomb, and called for a ban on "killer robots"....

HBM will help too. Foundry biz? On track for 2nm but bruised Samsung Electronics' Device Solutions unit reported on Tuesday a 68 percent year-on-year increase in sales for Q1 2024, largely thanks to its memory sales - a result that confirms what many had predicted: an AI and server boom has brought the chip shop out of the lows experienced in 2023....

PsiQuantum's coming home Australian researchers pioneered the development of solar panels, but the nation now imports them in huge quantities - a situation that's become emblematic of the nation's poor record of turning local innovation into jobs and profits across the supply chain....

Headcounts are down for the first time in ages, margins are up, and CEOs are happy When India's top four outsourcers - Wipro, HCL Tech, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) - announce their results, they often mention plans to hire thousands of new workers to both grow headcount and replace departed workers. But across 2023 and into 2024, that changed....

Carriers claim real culprits are getting away with it - the data brokers The FCC on Monday fined four major US telcos almost $200 million for "illegally" selling subscribers' location information to data brokers....

Third of a million developer accounts kiboshed, too Google says it stopped 2.28 million Android apps from being published in its official Play Store last year because they violated security rules....

Electric Mustang tech active right up to moment of crashes The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating an electric car maker whose self-driving-ish software was involved in a pair of fatal collisions. It's not Tesla this time, instead it's Ford's turn in the hot seat....

Whether the project will bear fruit is perhaps questionable Zilog's classic Z80 chip is soon to be dead, though it might not be gone forever if one open source project succeeds in its goal to clone the legendary processor....

Automaker could really do with the training data Tesla boss Elon Musk met with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing to discuss electric vehicles and self-driving cars....

Canadian stores shuttered 'until further notice' Updated Canadian pharmacy chain London Drugs closed all of its stores over the weekend until further notice following a "cybersecurity incident."...

Who let the dogs out? When regular people have disputes with neighbors, the more reasonable party will grit their teeth, bite their tongue, and try to avoid conflict as much as possible. When billionaires have disputes with millionaire neighbors, they'll see you in court....

Do not disable safeguards by default, says chipmaker Intel is reportedly telling motherboard manufacturers to use its recommended BIOS settings by default to stop CPU instability issues with 13th and 14th Generation chips....

iFought the law, but the law wasn't particularly interested in my line of reasoning The European Commission just brought months of legal wrangling to an end with a decision to add Apple's iPadOS to the Digital Markets Act's list of gatekeepers....

Never mind the record revenues, costs must be cut Updated Google's latest round of layoffs have hit engineers working on its Flutter and Python teams....

Satirical news site asks everyone for a buck The former CEO of web comms tools provider Twilio has bought The Onion, the US satirical magazine that saw its popularity boom in the early days of the web....

Irresistible magical tech runs headlong into immovable personal data regulations Privacy activist group noyb (None of Your Business) has filed a complaint against OpenAI, alleging that the ChatGPT service violates GDPR rules since its information cannot be corrected if found inaccurate....

Finance minister says government has interests in IT giant's 'sovereign activities' The French government has tabled an offer to buy key assets of ailing IT giant Atos after the company late last week almost doubled its estimate of the cash it will need to stay afloat in the near future....

At 34, things don't seem to work how they used to The Hubble Space Telescope has celebrated the 34th anniversary of its launch in the traditional way: by entering safe mode due to an ongoing gyroscope issue....

New laws mean vendors need to make clear how long you'll get updates too Smart device manufacturers will have to play by new rules in the UK as of today, with laws coming into force to make it more difficult for cybercriminals to break into hardware such as phones and tablets....

Sometimes Linux releases are like buses... frequently clustered together, and rarely as reliable as you might ideally want FOSS round-up Last week was a busy one for the open source community: EndeavourOS and TrueNAS Scale arrived on Tuesday, Fedora landed on Wednesday, and Ubuntu on Thursday....

Ad tech rewrite to replace web cookies still not to regulatory taste The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) still has privacy and competition concerns about Google's Privacy Sandbox advertising toolkit, which explains why the ad giant recently again delayed its plan to drop third-party cookies in Chrome until 2025....

Cabinet Office letter also reveals department lost money on unfinished database project The UK Cabinet Office has confirmed it is 17.5 million out of pocket after underwriting the official receiver of UKCloud, which went into liquidation in 2022....

Zed 80 is dead baby, Zed 80 is dead.... vulture claws over the astounding tech Opinion It lasted 50 years, but history finally claimed it. Zilog has called time on the Z80 CPU. Readers may have owned one in an 8-bit microcomputer or showered coins on one in an early arcade video game....

Sometimes there's more than enough blame to go around Who, Me? Welcome once again, gentle reader, to the safe space we like to call Who, Me? wherein Reg readers may unburden themselves with tales of times their tech prowess might have let them down....

Researcher finds it beats Intel's Xeons for speed on one database-related tests, joins AWS Gravitons in cost-efficiency win The homebrew Yitian 710 CPU developed in 2021 and deployed by Alibaba Cloud is the fastest Arm server processor for rent in hyperscale clouds when handling database-related tasks, according to research published this week in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers journal Transactions on Cloud Computing....

'Remarkably similar' to the Kirin 9000 processor that shocked many last year A teardown of Huawei's Pura 70 smartphone by an IC research firm revealed the Chinese tech giant is relying on Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp's (SMIC) HiSilicon Kirin 9010 processor, likely because US sanctions mean the Chinese company can't buy from other sources....

Core and boosters are on the pad ahead of (maybe) June launch The European Space Agency is ready to put together the first Ariane 6 rocket, and has declared the campaign to get it into orbit is under way....

ALSO: Infostealer spotted hiding in CDN cache, antivirus update hijacked to deliver virus, and some critical vulns Infosec in brief They say sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that appears to have been true in the case of Discord data harvesting site Spy.pet - as it was recently and swiftly dismantled after its existence and purpose became known....

PLUS: Huawei returns to top Chinese smartphone market; China's new IPv6 goals; Malaysia's golden VC Visa Asia In Brief Japan's effort to start a business disposing of space junk is off to a promising start, after the ADRAS-J satellite spotted its first target and sent back images....

Gay Gordon-Byrne of the Repair Association says US at least is nearing a tipping point Interview There's a lot of momentum behind the right-to-repair movement, and if anyone should know, it'd be Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association and longtime repairability advocate....

Compute Module 5 still on track for later this year New memory variants were this week launched for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module family. Customers can now specify a 4S with 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB, as well as the original 1GB version....

No, really. Look at the evidence Opinion One of the knee-jerk arguments made by companies abandoning their open source roots is that they can't make money because the bad hyper-cloud companies "steal" their open source services. True, at one time, the hyper-clouds took more than they gave. That's often no longer the case....

Continues to expand EMEA HQ in existing buildings instead SaaS biz application vendor Workday has pulled out of a new-build development in Dublin as it rethinks plans to expand EMEA HQ....

Laser beam comms are fast, so long as the weather cooperates NASA's optical communications demonstration has hit 25 Mbps in a test transmitting engineering data back to Earth from 140 million miles (226 million kilometers) away....

Shareholders are loving it. What are customers getting out of it all? Kettle This week a chunk of Big Tech reported its latest quarterly financial figures, and our beady eyes were on whether the ongoing AI obsession will pay off for these mega corporations....

Under Flight Rules, the crew should have turned back to Earth Former Space Shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale has posted a correction to NASA's history of STS-109, which he claims "is a lie" - although that may be a slight exaggeration....

Stacking the deck - we've heard of it Leaders of the world's most prominent AI companies are being recruited for the Homeland Security Department's new advisory group....

Not even maintenance is OK in the eyes of the Uncle Sam Under US pressure, Dutch photolithography giant ASML will no longer service certain chipmaking equipment purchased by Chinese customers....

Nobody's favorite operating system is now available for inspection In partnership with IBM, Microsoft has released the source code for MS-DOS 4.0, more than 35 years since the operating system made a muted appearance ahead of Windows 3.x....

One Chinese national arrested in Chicago while another suspect thought to be abroad Two Chinese nationals were this week accused by the US of attempting to illegally export chipmaking kit to a company back home, in another twist in the tech wars between the two nations....

Ouch! Millions of Kaiser Permanente patients' data was likely handed over to Google, Microsoft Bing, X/Twitter, and other third-parties, according to the American healthcare giant....

Cloud giant directs users to pack their bags for DropBox, gives them a year to get affairs in order Updated Amazon is killing its WorkDocs document sharing and content collaboration service, notifying users that sign-ups are no longer available and giving them a year to migrate any data stored....

Getting their hands on AI memory one Huawei or another... A group of Chinese semiconductor firms including Huawei are reportedly looking to get domestic production of high bandwidth memory (HBM) up and running by 2026....

Analysts brand deal a 'nail in the coffin' for UK tech investment Private equity investor Thoma Bravo has successfully completed a second acquisition attempt of UK-based cybersecurity company Darktrace in a $5.3 billion deal....

Yes, they are harder to solder, but there's way more potential Feature The Z80 has a long series of successor models - some compatible and some not. There are multiple options for hobbyist computer builders....

Tuta cries foul, Chocolate Factory denies service unreachable Tutao, known for the encrypted email service Tuta Mail, has filed a Digital Markets Act (DMA) complaint to the EU over an alleged de-ranking in Google Search....

Doing business in Beijing? 'You need to do a what-if scenario' interview It didn't seem America's divest-or-ban bill for TikTok was going to make it into law when we last spoke with former White House chief information officer Theresa Payton - but law it now is....